o be
considered, until Dr. Mary Walkers are not the exception, but the rule.
One now and then has the misfortune to come upon a specimen of
womanhood, good and solid enough perhaps, making a most exemplary and
respectable wife and mother, but nevertheless dull, heavy, and
unattractive to an extent that fills the wretched man who takes it in to
dinner with desperation. And then to think that one ounce of vanity
might have leavened this lump, and converted it, as by magic, into a
pleasant, palatable, convivial compound, good everywhere, but especially
good at the dinner-table! For, where vanity exists at all, it can
scarcely fail to influence the natural desire of one sex to please the
other; and a woman must be singularly devoid of all charms, physical and
mental, if she fails when she is really anxious to please. That women
should be fascinating, as they sometimes are, in spite of some
positively painful deformity, is a proof of what such anxiety can alone
accomplish.

We must admit that we have to postulate, on behalf of the female vanity
whose cause we are espousing, that it should not derive its inspiration
solely from self-love. However anxious a woman may be to please, if her
anxiety is on her own account, and simply to secure admiration, she must
be a very Helen if her vanity continues attractive. She is lucky if it
does not take the most odious of all forms, and, from always revolving
round self and dwelling upon selfish considerations, degenerate into a
habit of perpetual postures and stage tricks to gain applause. And this
tendency naturally connects itself with the wish to please the opposite
sex, its success being in inverse proportion to its strength. Just as
one occasionally meets with men who are perfectly unaffected and
sensible fellows in men's society, but whose whole demeanor becomes
absurdly changed if any woman, though it be only the housemaid with a
coal-scuttle, enters the room, so there are, more commonly, to be found
women whose whole character seems to vary, as if by magic, according to
the sex of the person whom they find themselves with. Before their own
sex they are natural enough; before men they are eternally
attitudinizing. We should be sorry to say that this repulsive form of
vanity always takes its root in excessive self-love, but still a tinge
of unselfishness seems to us the best antidote against it.

It is marvellous with how much vanity, and that too of a tolerably
ostentatious kin